Organic Light Emitting Diodes (OLEDs) have been known for some years and have been recently used in commercial display devices. Such devices employ both active-matrix and passive-matrix control schemes and can employ a plurality of light-emitting elements. The light-emitting elements are typically rectangular and arranged in two-dimensional arrays with a row and a column address for each light-emitting element and having a data value associated with the light-emitting element value. However, such displays suffer from a variety of defects that limit the quality of the displays. In particular, OLED displays suffer from non-uniformities in the light-emitting elements. These non-uniformities can be attributed to both the light-emitting materials in the display and, for active-matrix displays, to variability in the thin-film transistors used to drive the light-emitting elements.
A variety of schemes have been proposed to correct for non-uniformities in displays. These schemes generally rely upon first measuring the light output of the light-emitting elements in a display. U.S. Pat. No. 6,081,073 entitled “Matrix Display with Matched Solid-State Pixels” by Salam granted Jun. 27, 2000 describes a display and a video or display camera or a photo-sensor to detect the light output of the LED display in the presence or absence of ambient light. However, no specification for the resolution of the imaging system or the analysis process is provided.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,414,661 B1 entitled “Method and apparatus for calibrating display devices and automatically compensating for loss in their efficiency over time” by Shen et al issued 20020702 describes a method and associated system that compensates for long-term variations in the light-emitting efficiency of individual organic light emitting diodes in an OLED display device by calculating and predicting the decay in light output efficiency of each pixel based on the accumulated drive current applied to the pixel and derives a correction coefficient that is applied to the next drive current for each pixel. This patent describes the use of a camera to acquire images of a plurality of equal-sized sub-areas. Such a process is time-consuming and requires mechanical fixtures to acquire the plurality of sub-area images.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,473,065 B1 entitled “Methods of improving display uniformity of organic light emitting displays by calibrating individual pixel” by Fan issued 20021029 describes methods of improving the display uniformity of an OLED. In order to improve the display uniformity of an OLED, the display characteristics of all organic-light-emitting-elements are measured, and calibration parameters for each organic-light-emitting-element are obtained from the measured display characteristics of the corresponding organic-light-emitting-element. The technique acquires information about each pixel in turn using a photo-detector. However, this technique is very inefficient and slow in a realistic manufacturing environment.
There is a need, therefore, for an improved method of measuring uniformity in an OLED display that overcomes these objections.